As Apshawa Preserve in Passaic County struggles to thrive, some N.J. students work to save forest

Abe Brown/The Star LedgerA student from the Student Conservation Association conducts a field survey of vegetation in the Apshawa Preserve in West Milford.

WEST MILFORD — About 40 high school students followed trails deep into Passaic County’s Apshawa Preserve in an effort to save the forest.

With the help of a guide, they examined ground-level vegetation to see if the forced absence of deer would give the depleted woods a chance to thrive again. They looked at small ferns, and saplings just starting to grow leafy limbs. The heights of the plants looked good — just what they should have been after a year without deer.

But the future is a different matter.

"We need to know if anything will grow here," said the guide, Emile DeVito, New Jersey Conservation Foundation’s manager of science. "Birds won’t even breed here. They look around, and say, ‘Hell, there’s no place to breed.’ "

A year ago, DeVito led a project to use a wire fence to close off 300 acres in the preserve, which his organization and Passaic County jointly manage. The fence stopped the deer from entering the enclosure, hopefully allowing nature to recover. There are nearly 10 times as many deer as the environment can support, DeVito said, or roughly 75 deer per square mile.

The students, from Hunterdon and Essex counties, work for the Student Conservation Association, a nonprofit agency that pays them a small stipend. On their last job, they dug drainage ditches at Eagle Rock Reservation in Essex County. In the Apshawa Preserve on Tuesday, many still had the scrapes, cuts and poison ivy rashes from their Eagle Rock venture.

Abe Brown/The Star LedgerSome N.J. students rest after a field survey of vegetation at the Apshawa Preserve in West Milford.

To survey the preserve’s vegetation, the group picked about a dozen sites and recorded the plants’ height.

Some kids were experienced hikers. Others, like Ann Green, who will be a sophomore at the North 13 Street Technical High School in Newark, were out for their first time.

"I’m a city girl. I’m a house girl," Green said. "But I just wanted to come out here and experience everything. I wanted to know what dirt is all about — and all about the bugs."

Siobhan Finlay, who will be a sophomore at Montclair High School, worked with Ann, measuring the plants. She was more used to nature, she said, because she often goes for slow hikes with her mother. But they don’t go places quite like Apshawa.

"It’s not as remote where we go," she said. She looked around at the thick cluster of trees. "And not quite as woody."

The work might have gone faster without the kids, DeVito said, but that wasn’t the day’s point.

"Now there are 40 kids who know about the forest. Why keep this a secret?" he asked.